The Best New Chef in an Old Food Town

It sounds like a smokeless kitchen appliance, but Pur'Grill is actually one of Paris's few grill-style restaurants and home of its best new chef.

Here Jean-François Rouquette turns out a modern, streamlined cuisine that revolves around a few ingredients cooked perfectly, like meaty, pink-roasted squab with a caramelized-onion sauce or an extraordinary piece of true Wagyu beef smoked with grapevines and a potato puree that seems about ten-to-one butter-to-spuds. Rouquette relies on a smaller brigade of cooks than in most first-class Parisian restaurants, and by booking the sleek black chef's table beside the open kitchen, you'll see them in action -- a ballet of young pros grilling mullet fillets to a split-second juicy turn. This is Paris without the pomp. If only the exchange rate were as easy to swallow.